There Does Not Exist
Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, at the University of Chicago, Chicago US
12 February, 2025

The Non-Aligned Movement was founded in 1961 with the view to advancing interests of developing countries in the context of Cold War confrontation. In its first three decades, the Movement played a crucial role in decolonization, formation of new independent states, and democratization of international relations. At present, the NAM consists of 121 States that account for about 60% of the United Nations overall membership. Observer status in the NAM has been provided to 17 states and 10 organizations. The Non-Aligned Movement aspires to occupy a niche of a political gathering that seeks to oppose West’s unilateral approaches and actions on the global stage. NAM builds its work on ten Bandung principles, including: respect for the sovereignty, equality and territorial integrity of all states; rejection of the possibility of an unconstitutional change of government, as well as external attempts to change the regime of government; the preservation of the inalienable right for each state is free, without interference from outside, to determine its political, social, economic and cultural system; refusal from aggression and direct or indirect use of force; non-application of any unilateral economic, political or military measures. The functioning of the NAM is organized without any formal administrative structures and without a budget.

There are a multitude of vectors through which I began to approach There Does Not Exist, though none are necessarily fixed or required for experiencing the work. The first is what David Graver has called “the aesthetics of disturbance” vís a vís his analysis of the early experimental theater of Roussel, Benn, Vitrac, Lewis, and Kokoschka. In his analysis Graver outlines the early avant-garde playwright's antagonism toward established subject-object norms and how this disturbance, both cognitively and relationally, implodes the internal logic of “the thing” and the external logic of “its relation to other things”. This antagonism was quickly lost in the plastic arts of, say, Duchamp, when institutions recuperated the antagonistic objects of the avantgarde, Dada, surrealism, conceptualism etc, whereas the recuperation of action is, due to its immediacy and evanescence, much more difficult. Another vector I am interested in is the lineage of aleatory music, or chance operations in general. Specifically the idea that both the musical and movement based elements of the work are simultaneously composed (i.e. predetermined) and improvisational, that is, that the work unfolds stochastically within a bounded system. The semi-devised nature of this work allows for degradation in traditional creative authority while socially expanding the process. Another vector of this work is my interest in microtones, which have been largely theorized in sound and music but less so, if at all, in dance and performance. It is my stance that, if more classical positions are grand and epic, then microtonal positions are lyric, deflated, and exploit the figural immediacy and irregularities of the organism and its ability to move. Movement of the human body has been classically theorized as “chords in space”, but in the highly formal context of the trained professional. From Nuryev to the Bauhaus, to Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Noa Eshkol, Yvonne Rainer and Pina Bausch, most dance up until now, however experimental, has been extremely technical and practiced. My practice of microtonal movement, as it derives directly from music theory, is that there is a literal aesthetic frequency, accessible to the moving body, that exists between classical, harmonious, purely intoned notes, that is, positions. These movements are built around ideas of subtraction, exhaustion, negation, physical impairment and unprofessionalism, and are my attempt to transgress post-modern norms while not descending into the “weirdness for its own sake”.  Nor did I wish to sacrifice the power of image making. I am most interested in this collapse of genre that occurs when the process and its object are unfixed, e.g., the generative collapse of film, music, stagecraft, performance, and sculpture into each other. X M.S.W.

Performed & devised by Erin E. Lynch, Gasira Timir, Havadine Stone, Kaylyn Carter, & Kira Scerbin. Scored, directed, and produced by Micah Schippa-Wildfong.